Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  The accuracy of Tussaud’s waxworks and the speed with which the models appeared in her exhibition following the events in question were the key to her success. Her show was constantly being updated. She regularly advertised for private commissions, of subjects alive or dead, assuring people that the dead subject would be given ‘the most correct appearance of Animation’. Meanwhile, her staff attended courtrooms, making sketches, taking notes and negotiating to purchase items of clothing and personal possessions, so that recently executed criminals could be added to her exhibition as soon as they had been dispatched on the scaffold. Tussaud’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’ became so popular that some criminals donated their own clothes to her collection before their executions.

  What Tussaud offered was a kind of ignominious immortality as one of the stars of her show. She gave her subjects a life after death, albeit one fashioned in wax. If the guillotine transformed its subjects into objects, Tussaud breathed a little life back into them using her skills as an artist. And she did it to great effect. In Britain, Madame Tussaud’s exhibition of revolutionary heads, which were viewed by candlelight, played to the English fascination with recent events on the other side of the Channel. Here, visitors could see the most famous victims of the Revolution for themselves, and feel a little closer to the action, and the Chamber of Horrors soon included a wider range of notorious criminals for the paying public to inspect. Tussaud’s first model of a head severed in England was that of Edward Despard, the Irish soldier who was executed for plotting to kill King George III in 1803, and whose head had so confounded officials on the scaffold that they had to haggle and twist it off. Tussaud surprised Despard’s friends, who had been sent his remains, by asking whether she could make a cast of his head. The resulting model was exhibited under blue-tinged light and Tussaud’s visitor numbers rose accordingly.

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  Marie Tussaud worked with, and profited from, the illusion of the living dead. When an artist paints a portrait, or a severed head, or both at once, he or she is tracing a line between the physical and the imagined. A portrait requires an imaginative leap into the ‘soul’ of the subject; a sculpture of a severed head requires an imaginative leap across the borders of death, or at least to the very edge of the precipice.

  Some artists, like Caravaggio, seem to have been intent on stretching the painful boundary between life and death, holding it open with their art, exploring the space within. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the speed of the guillotine denied that space, rendering it invisible to the naked eye and tempting other artists, like Géricault, to enter it imaginatively. A freshly severed head seems to cling on to life even though life is gone. It is more brutal, more vigorous, more animated than a skull, but it belongs to the afterlife nonetheless. Like Salome’s maid, we cannot bear to look but we are compelled to draw in closer and confront a person’s fate face to face.

  Géricault, Tussaud, Hirst and Quinn all strove to make their images as real as possible, using flesh and blood in their pursuit of authenticity. Art can be a way of gaining a perspective on death, but it can also collapse that perspective and reregister the force of the blow. If a work of art provides a reassuring frame around events, these artists have experimented with removing that frame. Hirst, in an echo of Quinn’s ‘ultimate portrait’, has talked about his desire to ‘make art that was more real’. Art can push at the line between life and death, between reality and representation. But while a representation lacks the authenticity they all sought, the idea of a ‘real’ portrait is absurd.

  Marc Quinn has spoken of this: ‘I also think that the total self portrait-ness of using my blood and my body has an ironic factor as well, in that even though the sculpture is my form and made from the material from my body, to me it just emphasizes the difference between a truly living person and the materials which make that person up.’ The extreme, a dead person’s severed head, may be logical but it is not a portrait, because there is no illusion, no animation, none of the skills that the artist brings to his or her craft. A dead person’s head is not even that person any more, however much we might wish it to be so. Observers of the guillotine could not believe that severed heads were dead. They saw them twitch and move, and were convinced that these heads still saw and felt the world around them, but no one knows for sure if they were right, because no one has successfully communicated with a severed head (although not for want of trying, as we shall see).

  If science cannot bring a severed head back to life, then this is where the artist’s power lies. Art can realize all our darkest impulses, by bestowing life after death upon these monsters in limbo, no matter what the consequences might be. And artists, in turn, have been drawn to decapitated heads precisely because they refuse to be stilled. As any medical student will tell you, making a person into a thing takes a huge amount of effort, and the artistic gaze offers a space for the specimen to speak again on a very different stage. The stage – the canvas, the dissecting table or the shrine – frames our interactions with these alien beings, gives their presence legitimacy, and can grant them a voice far greater than any they enjoyed in life.

  5

  Potent Heads

  Every year on the first Sunday in July, hundreds of Catholics follow a procession of relics from Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Drogheda, just north of Dublin, to St Peter’s Church, a mile down the road, where a special mass is said. They march to remember the death in 1681 of Saint Oliver Plunkett, who has become a patron saint of peace and reconciliation in Ireland. In the procession are bishops, cardinals and papal knights, the Mayor and members of the town council, all wearing brightly coloured ceremonial robes. A pipe band accompanies them, and members of local religious and lay organizations carry banners as they walk, along with pilgrims and members of the public who join the festivities. Later, during the mass at St Peter’s Church, they sit in prayer together alongside Saint Oliver Plunkett’s head, which is kept there in an elaborate brass and glass shrine.

  The head of Saint Oliver Plunkett.

  Plunkett’s head, which is more than 330 years old, is very well preserved. His skin is brown and dry, his eyes are closed and sunken, and his nose is pinched, but there are still a few hairs on his head and chin, and he has a good set of teeth, which can be seen peeking out from behind his cracked lips. In the past, the excellent condition of Plunkett’s head has been heralded as one of its miraculous qualities, although it is likely to have been embalmed soon after his death, and more recently, the Church has invested some time and money into maintaining its good state of repair.

  Keeping a human head on display for a long time brings certain practical responsibilities. In 1990, the parish priest of Drogheda asked curators at the National Museum of Ireland to examine Plunkett’s head to check its condition. They found that the humidity inside its glass case was too high, which explained the tiny crystals appearing on Saint Oliver’s skin and some problems they had experienced with bug infestations over the preceding decades. While the head was being analysed, the Church decided to commission a new shrine for the relic. Its priorities were security, visibility, accessibility and maintenance, which may seem rather prosaic interests for a religious institution, but, as far as relics are concerned, the Church acts very much like a museum in its obligations to preserve its artefacts for the benefit of the visiting public. Plunkett’s head has to be kept safe while being easy to see, so that people can offer their petitions to the saint. Thousands of visitors come to see Plunkett’s mummified head every year; the majority are from Europe, America and Australia, and by no means all of them are Catholic. In light of this, the Church decided that its famous relic needed a new home, and, in addition to the important practical considerations, the religious authorities wanted to improve its ‘liturgical and aesthetic’ environment.

  A sacred and clearly very powerful object like Plunkett’s head – one that draws people together from all over the world – deserved a resting place that was suitably imposing as well as being a shrine that comm
unicated its significance for the Catholic community. The new shrine, which was installed in 1995, consists of a brass and glass lantern (allowing visitors to see the head from all sides) on top of a stone pedestal. A nine-metre-high gothic-style spire, tall and slender, connects the top of the lantern to the roof of the church. Plunkett’s head sits within the brass reliquary studded with gemstones, made for it in 1921, the year after Plunkett was beatified. On the surrounding walls, text panels tell the story of his life and death. From this, no one could doubt Oliver Plunkett’s central role in the identity of St Peter’s Church, the Catholic Church as a whole and the Irish national consciousness.

  It has not always been so. The truth is that Oliver Plunkett’s decapitated head has generated far more attention than its owner ever did while he was alive. Even Catholic historians agree that Plunkett’s life was relatively unremarkable. Unlike other saints who left their heads behind – the most famous being Saint Catherine of Siena, whose head is kept in the church of San Domenico – Plunkett did not have miraculous visions. He did not write theological tracts or get involved in papal politics. Although he was hard-working and led a Church riven by internal conflicts and wider persecution, little during his life set him on the track for martyrdom, and the circumstances of his death, although tragic, were not unique.

  Plunkett was one of a number of innocent victims of the anti-Catholic hysteria that surrounded the fictitious Popish Plot in the late seventeenth century. He had served as Archbishop of Armagh for ten years, during which time he had become involved in disputes between different orders within the Church. Plunkett worked under very difficult conditions in war-torn Ireland, and he proved to be an able and conscientious bishop who set a record for confirmations and promoted religious tolerance at a time of great unrest both within the Church and within Ireland as a whole. Nonetheless, his dealings with the clergy were often acrimonious and some people accused him of being high-handed; others argued that firm leadership was vital at a time when discipline within the clergy had completely broken down. In 1679 he was informed against by vengeful members of his own Church and put on trial, first in Dublin and then in London, where he became the last casualty of the Popish Plot. In fact, he was the last Catholic ever to die for his faith on the scaffold at Tyburn.

  Plunkett died an innocent man, but so did many other Catholics caught up in the furore of those years, and their fate by no means guaranteed sainthood. He is chiefly remembered for his great composure in the face of death. He spent six cold winter months in solitary confinement surviving on meagre prison rations, and yet he fasted for three days of each week and spent his time in continuous prayer. His equanimity is recorded in his letters. He wrote to his former secretary: ‘Sentence of death was passed against me on the 15th without causing me any fear or depriving me of sleep for even a quarter of an hour.’ His execution was postponed three times during the last fortnight of his life, and yet on the morning of his death he signed letters in a steady hand, and the Governor of Newgate Prison reported that, after a good night’s sleep, Plunkett went to the scaffold ‘as unconcerned as if he had been going to a wedding’. He gave a long speech, forgave his accusers, and went to his death reciting the words, ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’

  The executioner was said to have been so moved by Plunkett’s demeanour that he let him die before disemboweling him, and then allowed the dead man’s friends to take parts of his body as mementos. These stories are rather clichéd, and conventional legends also grew up around Plunkett’s body in the years after his execution. His head had been cut off on the scaffold after he died and thrown into a fire, where it was recovered by one of Plunkett’s friends, Elizabeth Sheldon, who took it home for safekeeping, along with both his forearms. People who inspected the head in the early years said that it smelled sweetly, which was certainly a miraculous quality after three or four years spent shut in a tin box. Meanwhile, his body was dismembered and buried, but some accounts record that when it was exhumed later it was found to have reassembled itself in the grave.

  Saintly bodies were often said to have resisted their own decay, and very occasionally they defied their own decapitation from beyond the grave. The martyred king, Saint Edmund, who was beheaded in 870, was later found in his coffin with no trace of his fatal injury except for a thin red line around his neck. No matter how hard they tried, the people who discovered his body could not separate his head from his torso. Some accounts also record that the tenth-century Irish king, Brian Boru, was beheaded at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 and later found incorrupt.

  In recent years the Catholic Church has distanced itself from tales of ‘magical’ relics, preferring to see saintly bodies as sites for remembrance and prayer. The leaflet about Saint Oliver in the Drogheda church cites the remarkable preservation of his head not as a sign of the miraculous incorruptibility of the flesh, but as a testament to the faith and good fortune of those who cared for the relic after his death. Still, Plunkett was canonized quite recently, in 1975, the first new Irish saint for 700 years, and Plunkett’s head, in its brass and glass box, certainly helped to mobilize support for his elevation to the ranks of sainthood. If his head had not been preserved and put on display in a church in Drogheda, where it has proved so successful at channelling the petitions of the faithful, Archibishop Plunkett may well have been relegated to the pages of history books.

  During the eighteenth century Plunkett was practically forgotten, but in the late nineteenth century two biographies of him were written, and these were followed by more popular books about his life in the early twentieth century. Thanks to the work of a small number of campaigners, he was beatified in 1920. The following year, Plunkett’s head was moved from a convent in Drogheda, where it had resided for more than two hundred years, to the town’s parish church, where it could be more easily seen and venerated by the public. Then, in 1933, the League of Prayer for the Canonization of Blessed Oliver Plunkett was established. Its members were committed to making Plunkett’s life story more widely known; they worked to bring pilgrims to the shrine in Drogheda, and they encouraged Catholics to pray urgently for the miraculous favours that were required for his canonization. They distributed leaflets, composed sermons and signed petitions.

  Since two major miracles had to be attributed directly to Plunkett’s intercession before he could be sainted, the relic of his head in Drogheda became central to the campaign. After the Second World War, small pieces of linen which had touched Plunkett’s head and face were issued to the faithful for 1½d, and people were asked to report any ‘favours received through the intercession of Blessed Oliver’ to the leaders of the campaign. Devotees reported on the sweet fragrance of the head, and its ‘lovely’ features, claiming that ‘generations of civilized living and culture went to the moulding of the temples and the fine chiselling of nose and lips’. According to Tomás Ó Fiaich, who was Archbishop of Armagh in the 1970s, Drogheda became ‘a national centre of devotion to Blessed Oliver’.

  In the event, though, Plunkett interceded in the miraculous recovery of a fatally ill woman in Naples in 1958, many miles from the resting place of his head in Drogheda. As the Italian woman lay on her deathbed, Sister Cabrini Quigley, a native of Donegal, prayed to Blessed Oliver through the night for a cure, and the next morning the sick woman defied her doctors’ predictions, regained consciousness and was restored to health. The campaign for Plunkett’s canonization was given a further boost in 1969, when the Blessed Oliver Plunkett Crusade was founded in Ireland and established the annual July pilgrimage to the shrine in Drogheda, which attracted thousands of pilgrims to pray before Plunkett’s head. In 1972, as the campaign gathered pace, the Naples miracle was approved by the Church authorities in Rome, and a few years later Plunkett was canonized.

  Elizabeth Sheldon, who had kept Plunkett’s head and arms safe in her house in the years after his death, was the first in a long line of followers who recognized the enormous power of his preserved head to catalyse support with
in the Catholic community. Whether Sheldon had kept Plunkett’s body parts as holy relics or simply as curiosities, she had the foresight to write a letter of authentication, which both she and the presiding surgeon signed, to attest to the history of her precious collection. The letter is kept today in St Peter’s Church, Drogheda.

  Oliver Plunkett’s head has continued to exert its power over the living for more than three centuries: it has helped to shape the Church’s perception of Plunkett himself and of his place within the Irish and Catholic consciousness, from archibishop to patron saint. The fact that his head resides in Drogheda, the site of one of the most famous massacres of the Irish by the English in 1649, has helped him to become a symbol of Irish nationalism, while within the Catholic Church, Plunkett has become a patron saint of peace and reconciliation thanks to his work at a time in Ireland’s history of great religious division, conflict and political oppression.

  Plunkett’s head was making a name for itself long before he had become a saint. Thousands of pilgrims visited it during the twentieth century. Among the many cardinals and bishops who came to pray before Oliver Plunkett’s head was the future Pope Paul VI, who visited Drogheda in 1961 as Cardinal Montini and who would later preside over Plunkett’s canonization ceremony. It would seem that Plunkett’s greatest and most steadfast advocate in the long campaign for his canonization was his own head. If nothing else, the Church has invested resources over the years to keep the head on display, in suitably imposing accommodation, and in reasonable condition. This in itself has bestowed a certain prestige on Oliver Plunkett, courtesy of his head.